The Tanner-Boy and How He Became Lieutenant-General (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 Excerpt: ...object for the possession of this wonderful river of rivers was not so much to follow it to its source, to float along its current, to admire its RECOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 159 scenery, to be astonished at its extent, as to be able to control its navigation. The Mississippi drains a country of over one million square miles. It is the vast watery outlet of the West for the productions of scores of millions of the people of America. God has decreed that it shall be free to all this people. As the chainless ocean, as the resistless tides that ebb and flow, as the uncurbed winds that wing their way through space, as the living currents that rise and fall in the human heart, so the great Father of Waters must be for ever free. The people at its source in Itasca cannot dam it up, and keep it there; the people at the Balize cannot build a barrier that it will not overleap as it rolls onward into the ocean. Every attempt of the kind to control the navigation of such free highways of commerce and travel has always signally failed, and must continue to fail for ever. The right of the inhabitants of the upper country of a navigable river to descend its course in freedom to its mouth has ever been maintained by a free people, and it ever will be. When, therefore, the occupants of the lower waters of the Mississippi River combined in an unholy alliance for the perpetuation of slavery, to prevent the occupants of its upper waters from enjoying its free navigation, they attempted more than men ever could or can accomplish. Here was one of the great fundamental and fanatical delusions of the slaveholders of America. As they thought, in their madness, that the people of Europe would succumb to their insolent demands for arbitrary sway to obtain their great Southern staple...